Year Won

Lord, it’s already a few days past the one year mark of my marriage. It’s full-on October out there, and snowy and cold, and just powdered-sugar-doughnuts beautiful. I’ve been married a whole year.

This is the time of year when I usually end up socially going off the map, as they say, for a little while. I can see last year I fell off the ol’ blog map too. What used to happen was I'd end up clicking into a super-introspective hibernation mode. I end up alienating most of my newest friends, not on purpose, but more on accident as my poor brain just shimmies free from all the loose dust of a year’s worth of perkiness and social grace. I'd end up sortof needing to re-boot for about three or four weeks. Now the year is crammed with birthdays and anniversaries and lo, the holidays are nigh, and the process of rebooting starts to fester and doesn’t ever get any attention until February. Alas.

For the day of our anniversary, not much happened. That’s kindof a theme in my life though – regardless of a special date, the “day” itself seems like it usually ends up being held later because of some conflict. Birthdays in national parks, birthday parties amalgamated with all the July-baby cousins a few weeks later. Once-in-a-life-time milestone date, actual “day” itself being re-scheduled to a more convenient time. It happens to everyone, eventually… and by now it’s less a regrettable frustration than a simple fact of life. Dates just aren’t that hard and fast and to be honest those numbers don’t mean much. Time is such a slippery thing anyway, I’ve never really gotten the hang of it. Being married for “a year” is quite a feat, and should be celebrated. And it will be. Being at a candle-lit dinner at exactly half-past 4:30 on October 18th would have been nice, but it would have kindof missed the point. It’s not like we can re-live that day… that’s all in the past and will never come back. That exact set of circumstances will never come to pass again, and we’d be fools to attempt it.

So yeah, we didn’t do much of that hallmark-y stuff this weekend. We installed tie-backs on the new curtains. We had a divine late-lunch buffet at a newly discovered Indian restaurant with my parents. We did normal every day weekend stuff.

This weekend, because my husband is a wonderful and thoughtful man, we’ll be sneaking away for a few days alone together in the mountains. It’s funny to say that, because when we’re both home from work and making dinner and watching House or Ghost Hunters or some crummy On Demand horror movie schlock… we’re always alone together. And it’s always wonderful. Somehow though, this kind of getaway is a different kind of “alone together”. It’s the travel kind, the more focused kind where we talk about nothing instead of trying to avoid stress from work. It’s the kind where we are in vacation-mode and we’re back in that screwy sort of getting-to-know-you mindset that feels refreshing and artificial and exhilarating all at the same time.

Sure, it’d have been nice to do it ON our anniversary date, but doing it a few days later in the grand scheme of things doesn’t really make much difference. The feelings are still there. We’re both still here. We’re both still going to take that big honeymoon trip sometime too. What I'm learning over the course of my life is that the date matters, but the event matters more. And the heart behind that event matters most.

I got my fairytale, by the gods, and there’s not a thing I’d change about it. Our little week-late anniversary escape is going to be awesome. And there’s not a thing I’d change about that either.